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I would never know.

When I was younger, watching Willow have something with her father used to bother me more than I wanted to admit. I wasn’t jealous of my sister, but there was a difference between having a daddy who lived somewhere else and not even knowing your daddy at all. She could pick up a phone and call hers. I couldn’t have picked mine out of a room full of strangers.

Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped needing the answer as badly.

If my father was still somewhere in this world living his life and never knew about me, there was nothing I could do about what my mom chose not to tell him. If he knew I existed and deliberately stayed away, then I damn sure wasn’t about to spend my adulthood chasing after a man who had already made his choice. And if he had died somewhere along the way, then finding out now wouldn’t give me a father; it would only give me another person to grieve.

Whatever the truth was, I had finally made peace with not knowing it.

But sitting there thinking about Kaidence made me understand something I hadn’t considered before. I never wanted my son to grow up wondering if his mama had answers about his father and simply refused to give them to him. The difference was, I truly didn’t have any.

I lifted my eyes toward the empty room again, taking in the grand space, the tall windows, the warmth.

“And now here I am, Caspian.” I let out a hollow breath. “Sitting right here in the house you spent years begging me to move into.”

Silence hung heavy in the room.

“I'm here,” I whispered, looking toward the empty side of the mattress. “I finally came home, and you’re not here.”

That realization broke whatever resolve I had left.

I bowed my head into my hands and wept until my chest ached and my throat burned.

I cried for the life that had been stolen from us, for the six years of endless questions, for the little boy down the hall who would only ever know his father through photographs and stories, and for the man I'd loved with every fiber of my being.

I sat there in the quiet room for what felt like forever, lost in the storm of my own grief. Slowly, the tears began to subside into ragged breaths. Then, in the absolute silence, the mattress shifted beside me… not much, just enough for the foam near my left hip to dip as though weight had settled onto the bed.

My breath caught.

I lowered my hands from my face and stared at the space beside me.

The duvet hadn’t moved, but the indentation beneath it was unmistakable.

For several seconds, I didn’t move either.

“Okay…” I whispered.

I reached out cautiously, hovering my fingers above the empty spot before finally pressing my palm against it.

Nothing… just cool fabric.

I sat up straighter and wiped beneath my eyes. “Get a grip, Lakelyn. It’s a mattress. Mattresses settle.”

Even to me, the explanation sounded weak, but I was exhausted, emotional, and sitting in a bedroom filled with memories of a man I had just cried myself sick over. My mind was probably working overtime.

At least, that was what I told myself.

Then something warm and solid moved across the center of my back.

I jerked forward and spun around so fast my heart seemed to jump straight into my throat.

Nobody was there.

I searched the bedroom, suddenly much more alert than I had been seconds earlier. Nothing around the bed had moved. The nightstands were untouched, both closet doors were closed, and the entrance to the bathroom stood exactly as I’d left it.

Still, the warmth between my shoulder blades remained.

That hadn’t felt like air; it had felt like a hand… a large one.